OBSERVE that the fullness of time, with all the mysterious spiritual resonances that the phrase has, actually is in time. It belongs to history. It has indeed been dated for us with some precision. Time came to its fullness during the reign of Augustus who, having defeated Mark Antony and his ally, Cleopatra, ruled from 27bc to ad14 and out of the ancient Roman Republic and its conquests fashioned the Roman Empire, whose destiny was to be so closely linked with that of Christ's Kingdom on earth. St. Luke tells us that Augustus decreed a census of the whole Empire: as a consequence Joseph, a carpenter, a man of David's clan and family, went from Nazareth in Galilee to register in David's city of Bethlehem in Judea. With him was his wife, Mary, also of David's line, still a virgin and ever to be a virgin. And in Bethlehem she gave birth to Jesus, who was the Christ, the Anointed One, the expectation of the nations.
For this, the highest function to which any human person had ever been called. God had prepared Mary most exquisitely. Her own conception in the womb of Anne, her mother had been in the ordinary way of nature. But in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Church teaches that from the moment that she was conceived, sanctifying grace was by the power of the Blessed Trinity in her soul: thus she was never stained by Adam's sin. Throughout her life she was, by the power of the same most Holy Trinity, preserved from all personal sin. In due course she was betrothed to Joseph the carpenter— whose glory in the eyes of God's Church has grown steadily, for all that we have not one word of his recorded.
During the time of betrothal, God (as St. Luke tells in his first chapter) sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth where Mary was. And Gabriel greeted her: Hail, full of grace; the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women. Then came his message: Mary, do not be afraid; thou hast found favour in the sight of God. And behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call him Jesus. He shall be great, and men will know him for the Son of the Most High; the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he shall reign over the Kingdom of Jacob eternally; his Kingdom shall never have an end. Mary said to the Angel: How can that be, since I have no knowledge of man? The Angel answered: The Holy Spirit will come upon thee, and the power of the most High will overshadow thee. Thus that holy thing which is to be born of thee shall be known for the Son of God.
Thus she conceived. And to Joseph, profoundly troubled, an angel appeared in a dream and said: Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take thy wife Mary to thyself, for it is by the power of the Holy Ghost that she has conceived this child; and she will bear a son, whom thou shalt call Jesus, for he is to save his people from their sins.
And now in Bethlehem Jesus is born: and at the Presentation Simeon under the inspiration of God hails Him as The light which shall give revelation to the Gentiles, the glory of God's people Israel.
For the first thirty years of His life we know almost nothing. Warned that Herod sought the life of the new-born Messias, Joseph fled with his wife and the Child to Egypt: Herod died (ad4) and the family returned to Nazareth. When Jesus was twelve, there was a curious episode (to which we shall return) when they lost the child and found Him again in the Temple. Apart from that, nothing until He was about thirty.
Here again St. Luke dates the moment for us. In the fifteenth year of the reign of Augustus's successor, Tiberius, (who reigned from ad14 to 37) John the Baptist went all over the country round Jordan, baptizing and preaching that the Christ was at hand. To him came Jesus; and John cried: This is the Lamb of God; this is He who takes away the sin of the world.
From then we may date the three years of Our Lord's public life,
ending in His death by crucifixion.
On the third day after His death He rose again to life;
and forty days after that He ascended into heaven.
The story in its main outlines is familiar to all Christians.
What we want now is to get at its meaning.
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We have to consider what Our Lord actually came into the world for. If you have taken the advice given in the first section of this book, you will have been taking special note of anything in the Gospels upon what Christ had come to do. The angel Gabriel who announced His coming to the Blessed Virgin Mary, His mother, told her that He was to be called Jesus, which means saviour, and that He was to be ruler of a kingdom which should never end (Luke i.31-34). The angel who appeared to St. Joseph added a precision to the word saviour— He was to save His people from their sins. John the Baptist, sent by God to prepare the people for the coming of Christ, said: This is the Lamb of God. This is He who takes away the sin of the world. (John i. 29.) The second phrase repeats what we already know, that He is to save, and to save from sin, and adds, with the word Lamb, the hint that He will be offered in sacrifice.
Our Lord Himself says many things upon what He had come for. Some of them represent not the purpose itself, but rather what He knows to be the certain result of what He has come to do: Do not imagine that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have come to bring a sword, not peace. (Mt.x.34); or I have come into this world so that a sentence may come upon it, that those who are blind should see, and those who see should become blind. (Jn.ix.39); or the intensely suggestive It is fire that I have come to spread over the earth, and what better wish can I have than that it should be kindled. (Lk..49).
But what we must concentrate upon are His direct statements as to the purpose of His coming. To Zacchaeus, the chief publican, He said: (Lk.xix.10) That is what the Son of Man has come for, to search out and to save that which was lost. Compare this with what He had said earlier to Nicodemus (Jn.iii.15): This Son of Man must be lifted up, as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the wilderness; so that those who believe in Him may not perish, but have eternal life. Following this, we have either as part of Our Lord's speech to Nicodemus or written in commentary by the Evangelist: God so loved the world, that He gave up His only-begotten Son, so that those who believe in Him may not perish, but have eternal life. When God sent His Son into the world, it was not to reject the world, but so that the world might find salvation through Him. To the Roman governor Pilate He said (Jn.xviii.37): What I was born for, what I came into the world for, is to bear witness of the truth. To the Pharisees and Scribes He said (Lk.v.32): I have come to call sinners to repentance. He sent out His Apostles (Lk.ix.2) to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to work miracles in support of their message. To the Apostles, angry with James and John for seeking the first place in His Kingdom, He said (Mt.xx.28): The Son of Man did not come to have service done Him; He came to serve others and to give His life as a ransom for the lives of many. Again to the Pharisees He said (Jn.x.10): I have come so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.
These texts cover what He had to say directly as to why He had come. Observe that what He says of Himself is simply a development of what had already been said about Him— He is to save, to save from sin, to found a Kingdom; the hint in St. John's word "Lamb" is now made explicit— He is to give His life a ransom for many; then there is the assertion of truth, the reality of things; and there is a further precision as to what salvation was from— He was to save a world that was lost, a race in danger of perishing— and a profounder statement as to what salvation was to be— life, more abundant life, eternal life: and, as we shall see from other things He said, life in union with God, as sons of God. But indeed upon every element in this summary of His purpose in coming we shall get great light from the rest of His teaching.
So St. Paul was to find. He more fully and closely than any analysed what Our Lord came to do. It would be possible to make an immense list of the things he has to say on the subject; much of it will be quoted later. He uses a great number of different words to express the work Our Lord did, because what He did was as many-sided as the damage we received from Adam and the spiritual needs of man: and one word or another is more appropriate according to which particular effect of Our Lord's work St. Paul has in mind. Here we may note three words which he uses again and again: the word REDEEM, which means literally to buy back, to pay a price for something lost, so that it is roughly equivalent to RANSOM; the word RECONCILE which means restoring good relations, bringing harmony where there is discord, and so represents the heart of atonement, and the word JUSTIFICATION which means giving us that natural and supernatural rightness which God designed for us and is therefore a way of expressing the result of reconciliation with God.
As an example of redeem, we have In the Son of God, in His blood, we find the redemption that sets us free from our sins. (Col.i.14).
Reconcile we find in: Enemies of God, we were reconciled to Him through His Son's death. (Rom.v.10); It is God who, through Christ, has reconciled us to Himself and allowed us to minister this reconciliation of His to others. Yes, God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, establishing in our hearts His message of reconciliation, instead of holding men to account for their sins. (2 Cor.v.18-20.)
For justification, we find: We have found justification through His blood. (Rom.v.9), So being justified by His grace, we were to become heirs, with the hope of eternal life set before us. (Titus iii.7).
In the Epistle to the Romans (iii.24) St. Paul gives us all three effects: Justification comes to us as a free gift from His grace, through our redemption in Christ Jesus. God has offered Him to us as a means of reconciliation, in virtue of faith, ransoming us with His blood.
The new relation to which reconciliation brings us, the living element in justification, is to be sons of God by adoption, sharing the inheritance of Christ: The spirit you have now received is not, as of old, a spirit of slavery, to govern you by fear: it is the spirit of adoption which makes us cry out Abba, Father. (Rom.viii.14-15.)
If we were to go no further than this into the meaning and mission of Christ
Our Lord, we should still have enough to see Him as our only hope.
If we had never heard of Adam's sin (or having heard of it, did not believe
it), we should still know our own sinfulness and need of cleansing;
if we knew nothing of all the past, one look at the world would tell us of
its urgent need for healing.
Knowing these things, we need no very profound theology to tell us that in
Christ Our Lord is salvation for us and for all men.
So millions have found Him, and millions will still find Him.
Yet it remains that there are depths below depths of under-standing possible,
and theology can open them to us.
There is immense gain of every sort in seeing the detail of the relation between
men's need and Christ's work.
For our special purpose in this study—
to get some understanding of what life is about—
it is indispensable.
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St. Paul's words, "redeem" and "reconcile" and "justify", are the fundamental ways of saying what Christ Our Lord came to do, for they state the ways in which His one single action solved the twofold problem set by the one single sin of Adam.
As we have seen, the race had lost its oneness with God, and Our Lord did the work of at-one-ment or reconciliation, restoration of man to sonship. In this restored sonship lies man's right relation to God which St. Paul calls "justification". But also the race had, by its sin, put itself in debt to God's justice, and Christ paid the debt: for He offered to God an act which expiated, balanced, compensated for the act by which the race had chosen itself as apart from God. This is the root idea of the word redeem, which literally means to buy something back, pay a price for the recovery of a captive. The metaphor must not be pressed too far: God was not a gaoler holding men captive until Christ paid a ransom to free them from His hands: on the contrary, what held men captive was not God but sin, and the object of redemption was not to take men from God but to bind them to Him in a life-giving union. Yet there is a real sense of a price paid: something was due from man as a preliminary to restoration, and Christ rendered it for us by His death. So St. Paul can say (i Cor.vi.20): You are bought with a great price, and St. Peter (in his first Epistle i.19-20): You were not redeemed with corruptible things as gold and silver ... but with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled.
Thus we have two elements in what Our Lord did. He made satisfaction for man's sins, and He merited for men the new life of sons reconciled to their Father. The word Redemption, though in its literal meaning it seems to apply especially to the element of satisfaction for sin, is ordinarily used also to cover the whole restoring work of Christ, and so to include the reconciliation and the justification: and this is natural. To "redeem" is "to buy back", and if the "buy" suggests the satisfaction, the "back" suggests the restoration. The important thing, when we use the word Redemption for Christ's whole work of re-establishing humanity, is that we should see that there are two elements.
The Council of Trent (vi.7) says that Our Lord through the great charity wherewith He loved us, by His most Holy Passion on the wood of the cross, merited justification for us and made satisfaction to God on our behalf.
Notice again that it was not a question primarily of redeeming individuals, but of redeeming the human race to which these individuals belonged. As we have seen, St. John the Baptist speaks of Our Lord as taking away the sin of the world: not sins, sin. There was a sin of the world, which was the background against which all individual sins were written. The sin of the world was the breach between the human race and God, and it stood between men and the sonship of God. Christ healed it. It is in this widest sense that He is the Saviour of mankind. The individual does not need to sin in order to have Christ as his Saviour: the child who dies in the moment of Baptism never having committed any personal sin at all still has Christ for its Saviour, because it shares in the benefits of the act by which Christ reconciled to God the race to which it belongs: Our Blessed Lady, Christ's mother, who had God's grace in her soul from the first moment of her existence could still call God her Saviour, not only because He saved her from committing sin, but because He had saved the race of Adam whose sinless descendant she was.
This thing that Our Lord came to do, the restoration of the broken relationship, is the primary thing if we are to understand His mission at all—what He came to do, and who He was that came to do it. We have already seen from the Gospels that Christ is God. St. Paul tells us so as clearly (Col.ii.9): In Christ the whole plenitude of the Godhead is embodied (or in the Douay version:In Christ dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily).
We have seen also that Christ, not ceasing to be God, is man too. The opening of St. John's Gospel tells us how the Word, who was God, was made flesh, was incarnate; again St. Paul has his own way of saying it: His nature is from the first divine and He thought it no usurpation to claim the rank of Godhead; He dispossessed Himself, and took the nature of a slave, fashioned in the likeness of men, and presenting Himself to us in human form; and then He lowered His own dignity, accepted an obedience which brought Him to death, death on a cross. (Phil.ii.6-9.)
The Incarnation was God's answer to the double problem which faced fallen mankind. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Son, became man, took to Himself and made His own a human nature; and in that nature offered to God the sacrifice which outbalanced the sin of mankind, and merited the supernatural restoration of man: so that Adam's offence was expiated, the breach it had caused between God and man was healed, so that God and man might be at one again, and man brought back from servitude to sonship.
To see how totally the Incarnation answers the problem we must consider more closely the relation of the humanity of Christ to his Godhead. It might be well to re-read chapter vi (section ll), where the distinction between person and nature is discussed in some detail. Here I need only summarize. Given a rational being, the nature answers the question what, the person answers the question who; again the person does what is done in the nature, but the nature conditions what the person does. The person does what his nature enables him to do. The nature is a source of possible actions: if any of those actions get done, it is the person who does them, not the nature. Where it is question of a finite rational nature, there is a question not only of doing things but of having things done to one, suffering, in a general way experiencing. Here again the nature is decisive as to what may be done or suffered or experienced; but the person does and suffers and experiences.
We may now apply these distinctions to God-made-man as earlier in the book we applied them to the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. God the Son was a Person, a Someone, possessing the nature of God in its fullness, and this in the eternity of the Divine Being. At a certain point in time He took to Himself and made His own a human nature. Thus we have the unique instance of one single person with two natures, divine and human. To the question "Who are you"? Christ would have but one answer. He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Son, the Word. But to the question "What are you"? Christ Our Lord would have two answers, for He has two natures; He is God and He is man. Note the consequences for Our Lord's actions. Nature decides what the person can do. This one Person had two natures, two sources of action from which He could draw. He had the Divine Nature, and so could do all that goes with being God. He had a human nature, and so could do all that goes with being man. But whether He was doing the things of God in His Divine Nature or doing the things of man in His human nature, in either event it was the Person Who was doing them: and there was but the one Person and He was God.
Thus Christ Our Lord, having a human nature, was able to perform a human act; but He who performed it was a divine Person. Being able to perform a human act. He could offer it in expiation of the human act of Adam. But because He was a divine Person His human act had a value which no act of a merely human person could have had.
And this same union in Him of human and divine which was the ground of His
work of expiation, was the ground of His work of reconciliation, too.
If the human race were to be brought back from servitude to sonship, here was
the man who in Himself was Son and not servant;
if the human race were once more to be at one with God, here in Christ Jesus
humanity was already united with the Godhead in a union of inconceivable closeness.
Christ Our Lord was the atonement before He made the atonement.
He alone could perform an act at once human and divine.
Thus He could offer to God an act of obedience in love which as human could
rightly be set against humanity's sin of rebellion in self-love, and which
as divine must have all the value needed, or immeasurably more than all the
value needed, to satisfy for it.
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